Some of you may be aware that the deadlines for The Eighth Court were very tight, and an extension was needed to get the book to where it needed to be. I am immensely grateful to my Editor, Lee Harris, for his patience and understanding while all this was going on. He’s a star, and he gave me the time I needed.

Unfortunately, that didn’t leave Lee much time to get everything done for the release date, and when things get pressured mistakes can be made – in this case, the acknowledgements and end-notes for The Eighth Court were missed and the paper version went to press without them. This is not so bad in the case of the electronic versions – they are being updated and if you delete the book and reload it you should get the newly uploaded version. I’m not sure exactly when this will happen, as it’s down to the eBook Store concerned when it gets updated, but it’s being worked on and the update is in progress.

The paper version is much more difficult as it’s been type-set and it’s really difficult to change once that has happened. However, we live in the age of the Internet and there are things we can do. If you go to the following address, you will find the End-Notes and the Acknowledgements for The Eighth Court.

The Eighth Court, the fourth and final book in the series, The Courts of the Feyre, is finished. It’s with my publisher, who may request some revisions or amendments, and after that it has to go through copy edit, and proof-reading, and all the other publication magic but, to me, it feels finished. I’m not going to spoil it for readers by sharing the plot, but I would like to reflect on the series, and what writing the last book was like.

It was hard. The last year hasn’t been the easiest of times for reasons to do with the health and well-being of the people closest to me. Fortunately everyone seems to be pulling through and things are generally on the up, which is a relief to us all. Setting myself apart from all that to write has been difficult, but even without the events of the year this book would have been hard.

The Eighth Court

I’ve been working full-time while I’ve been writing, which is great because it pays the bills. I have a job in IT that is engaging, complex and sometimes difficult, and one of the challenges has been the gear-change between working, where I’m thinking about networks, servers and infrastructure, and writing, where I’m thinking about characters, plots, scenes and settings. Writing requires a different mind-set, and I confess that some evenings I wasn’t able to make the switch, which meant that either I got no writing done, or the next day I would sit down and delete everything from the previous day and start again. Although the book is just under 120,000 words, I estimate that I’ve written closer to 180,000 words. Some chapters have been written two or three times before I felt they were right.

I set out with some clear goals. I already knew how the series would end, or I thought I did, and I had to work towards that end in a way that made sense for the characters and the situation that had already been created. There were some questions that were created by the previous books in the series, and those questions needed answers. The series themes, of things hidden in plain sight, of events from long ago having impact in the present day, and of a hidden world beneath the one we know, needed to be continued and developed. The one big question – what has this all been about – needed an answer.

With this being the final book in the series, I didn’t want to bring in a lot of new characters or elements which hadn’t been seen before. There are already well over 50 characters in the books, some of whom are dead, or won’t be seen again, but I felt there was plenty to work with. There are a few minor characters that appear in this book but mostly they’re people we’ve already encountered earlier. The magic in the book is consistent with the magic that already exists. There are some surprises, but those are consistent with what we already know. The world of the Feyre has a lot of detail behind it which dictates how and why things are the way they are, and in this final book more of this will be revealed, but the world will remain largely mysterious. Be assured, there are rules and constraints and reasons, but they’re not in the book. Perhaps one day there will be a Courts of the Feyre bestiary, but not yet.

Most of all, I wanted this to be a satisfying end to the series, and that meant delivering on the promises set by the previous three books. Niall, Blackbird and Alex each have their own plot arc, and each of these arcs needed to reach a conclusion in this book. Each of them had been changed by the events in the series, and in the final book those changes needed to bear fruit – we should feel that they have reached a conclusion and a resolution. It turns out that writing the final book in a series is harder than writing any of the others. I think I said once that if I’d known how hard writing would be I would never have started – that applies even more to a series. I liken it to rolling a snowball – the more you roll it, the bigger it gets and the harder it is to roll, but roll it must.

And when I got to the end that I’d planned from the start, it didn’t work the way I thought it should. I was forced to step back, reconsider, and write a different ending. I like the new ending, but it was a total surprise. I had no idea it was going to end quite like that, but the new ending works so much better.

Before I sent the book to my editor, Lee, I went back to my goals and asked myself where exactly I had delivered on the objectives I’d set for myself. I found the pieces in the text and read them back to make sure I’d done what I set out to do. To me, it’s all there, and that’s why I can say that it feels finished. Of course, I’m not the final arbiter of that, and you the readers must judge that for yourself.

To me, though, The Courts of the Feyre feels complete, and I’ve told the story I set out to tell.

The news has broken, and you can read about it here and here, but since you are on my website I can tell you about it myself.

I am pleased to announce that Angry Robot Books have agreed to publish two more books in the series, The Courts of the Feyre. The third book in the series, Strangeness & Charm, concerns what happens when the escapees from The Road to Bedlam are released into the wider community, and the fourth brings this series to a finale with The Eighth Court.

These books will feature Niall and Blackbird as well as Niall’s wayward daughter Alex. The stories will be complete in themselves as with Sixty-One Nails and The Road to Bedlam, but will be best enjoyed as a series following Niall’s adventures through the four-book sequence.

The reason for the late announcement on the website is that I have been on a research trip to track down a rare medieval survivor, along with some surprises that even I did not suspect. All I can say at this stage is that these fit perfectly into the stories being written at the moment and you will see the fruits of that trip presently.

Strangeness & Charm is scheduled for June 2012, with the fourth book, The Eighth Court, due for release in early 2013.